The Darwin Conspiracy (24 page)

As he walked back through the woods toward the inn, he felt the satisfaction of a detective who’s nailed down a clue. The phrase in Lizzie’s diary, the words that FitzRoy had spoken to her in his madness, wasn’t:
You Inglish—no lifeless.
It was:
You Inglish know life less . . .

So that was it—a message representing Jemmy Button’s final disillusionment with the English and the civilization they personified. For all their knowledge, for all their accomplishments, the overlords knew less of real life than his own fellow Indians.

Hugh had long been intrigued by the saga of Jemmy, plucked up from a canoe, paraded around London, then dropped back into his natural world. He had wondered about his role in the
Allen Gardiner
massacre, for history had been moot on that particular point: Jemmy had been charged with the heinous act but never positively cleared of it.

That detail from the cook’s testimony, the description of the plundering savage bedding down in the Captain’s cabin while his tribesmen hacked and roasted the white men’s flesh on the beach, had a compelling ring of truth. Hugh had sometimes tried to imagine himself as the Indian, what it must have been like to contend with the dueling worlds, the confusion he must have felt, the rage and self-hatred.

This little piece of paper was a cry from the grave. It didn’t solve the mystery of Jemmy’s schizophrenic existence, but it suggested that he had come to terms with it. Against the power and complexity of nineteenth-century industrialized Britain, he had chosen his own people and his own primitive but vital life in the hellish southernmost spur of South America.

The following morning, bolstered by a feeling of success, Hugh decided to pay a visit to Cal’s laboratory to see what he could find out about his brother’s termination. He pulled into the driveway of the Oxford Institute, grateful at least that the facility was situated sixteen miles south of Oxford and not in the town itself. This way he wouldn’t have to run the gauntlet of ghosts that would surely be waiting for him in every courtyard and every doorway of the High Street.

The appearance of the lab was disappointing. In his mind’s eye, from hearing Cal brag about it, Hugh had pictured a large campus, four or five buildings set among the shire’s hills and dells. He had envisioned scientists in white coats—some of them attractive females—bustling about the place, taking breaks on slate-paved terraces, drinking hot coffee from thick china mugs as they worried along their experiments. Instead, there was one ugly, low-slung brick building with an unprepossessing entrance, a thrusting slab above a single revolving door, surrounded by an asphalt parking lot.

A security guard found his name on a list and raised the bar obstructing the entrance. He was to see an administrative assistant, one Henry Jencks, and he had been led to believe on the phone that he would not be able to obtain much information. He had gotten the appointment only through old-fashioned American badgering.

A receptionist gave him a toothy smile and asked him to wait, tilting her heard toward a bank of modern metal and vinyl chairs next to some vending machines offering soft drinks and candy.

He had trouble imagining Cal here, nodding hello to colleagues, walking down the bright laminated hallways. The place seemed lifeless and sterile, not a hothouse of cutting-edge research, but as deadening as an insurance company.

“Hugh, it’s time to grow up, boy. Time to get serious. How many times
have you driven cross-country now—seven, eight? How many different jobs
have you had? Bartending, picking apples, construction, the post office, selling souvenirs at the Empire State Building, for Christ’s sake.”

“They’re summer jobs. I was in college.”

“But you’re not now and it’s time to decide what you’re going to do with
your life. You want to end up a deadbeat lawyer like Dad? You want to run
for the six-fifteen train every night and grab a drink at Grand Central and
hardly wait until you’re home to grab another one and conk out? When I was
your age, I already knew what I wanted to do.”

“You sound like you’re fifty already. You’re only twenty-seven.”

“It’s never too soon to smarten up.”

“You’re lucky. You found something you love. I’m still looking.”

“Well, hurry up. Sometimes I think you carry this bohemian shit too far.

You act like you’re trying to accumulate a résumé of shit jobs for the back of a
paperback novel.”

He had been talking about Cal a lot to Beth. She was a good listener, asking few questions but always the right ones, quick to point out the false notes in his well-constructed, self-taught narrative. Yesterday, when he had recited the story of his expulsion from Andover, she had been surprised to learn that Cal was involved. “You mean he drove up from Cambridge to celebrate your getting in to Harvard and you ended up losing your admission there?” she had exclaimed. “Think about that for a minute.”

Later that night he had remembered a visit to London when he and Cal attended a gut-wrenching performance of
Long Day’s Journey into
Night
at the National Theatre. In the fourth act, the brothers have their climactic moment of truth. Jamie, the elder, his tongue loosened by drink, swears he loves Edmund and then abruptly lashes out and warns him to be wary of him:
“Never wanted you to succeed and make me look
bad by comparison. Wanted you to fail. . . . Mama’s baby, Papa’s pet!”
At that moment, Hugh turned his head slightly in the darkened pit of the theater and saw Cal looking back at him. Their eyes met. Not a word was said. Nor did they ever talk about it afterward.

“Mr. Kellem? May I help you?”

The voice was thin and reedy, already sounding defensive. Hugh followed Henry Jencks down the hall to his office, settled in across the desk from him, and explained that he had come to learn as much as he could about his late brother’s work.

“I’m afraid I cannot be of much help. That information is confidential, for reasons you can surely understand.”

They fenced for a while.

“Tell me this,” Hugh finally said. “Did he actually quit his job or was he on some kind of holiday leave?”

A pause. “I have checked the record. He was in fact no longer working here as of June the tenth six years ago. I’m afraid I cannot say more than that.”

“So he did quit?”

“I cannot say.”

“What kind of research was he doing?”

The question caused some consternation. “I don’t believe I am at lib-erty to answer that either.”

Hugh drove back to Cambridge breaking every speed limit.

That afternoon, sitting at his customary place in the library—the corner table—Hugh felt stymied. He had come to the end of Lizzie’s journal and was still none the wiser. There were those intriguing passages about Darwin vetting his own journals and changing his manuscript, but they were short on specifics. He’d not been able to track down the journals themselves; a number of them were indeed missing, but that was hardly proof of misconduct in and of itself. There was that enigmatic reference to a
nuit de feu,
whatever the hell that was. And some dramatic stuff about FitzRoy’s suicide, which—aside from Lizzie’s encounter with him—was already known (he checked).

Even more, he was beginning to have doubts about Lizzie’s veracity.

The thought occurred to him that perhaps she was just a young woman hung up on her father, who saw drama and conspiracy where none existed, filtering everything through an overwrought Victorian sensibility teeming with repressed emotion. Or worse, maybe she got her kicks out of laying little clues that would explode in the face of some future historian—such as himself.

Roland came over.

“Things that bad, huh?”

“You know the expression ‘two steps forward and one back’? With me, it’s the reverse.”

“Anything I can do?”

Hugh shook his head. Roland walked away but Hugh called him back.

“Maybe one thing. Have you ever heard of a poem called
Goblin
Market
?”

Roland shot him an odd look. “Now you’re far afield. Yes. But what of it?”

“Just curious. I heard of it recently. Tell me about it.”

“It’s by Christina Rossetti. A big hit in its day. It’s about two sisters—
one pure, one who gives in to the temptations of the flesh. Very Victorian. Spirituality and concupiscence, arm-in-arm . . .”

“Concupiscence?”

“Yes. It was written for the whores of Highgate Prison where Rossetti worked. It’s supposed to be about the virtue of abnegation, but personally I think it must have turned all those working girls on. It oozes eroticism.”

“I see.” Hugh remembered: Highgate—that’s where Lizzie ended up doing volunteer work, reading to the female inmates.

“And why are you interested in it?”

“It was important to Lizzie. It held some special meaning for her.”

Roland raised his eyebrows. “Ah, light dawns. Stay there—and don’t move a muscle. That’s an order.”

In five minutes he was back, carrying a thin volume, unable to repress a smug smile.

“Not only did I bring you her favorite poem,” he said. “I brought you her very own copy.”

Hugh was genuinely amazed. “How?”

“Our Darwin collection is huge. Elizabeth—Lizzie—lived out her spinster days in Cambridge, in a small house right here on West Road. 
When she died, her effects, including her library, came to us.”

He handed Hugh the book. “You have no idea what we have back in those stacks. Darwin’s papers alone fill sixteen boxes. Acid-proof, you’ll be happy to know.”

Hugh held the book on his palm. It had a thick, clothbound cover but was remarkably light.

“I thought you said it had all been raked over.”

“The Darwin material, yes. Lizzie, no. In fact, you’re the first person to request that book—at least since 1978, when we went to computers. I didn’t bother to go all the way back in the card catalogue.”

Roland left and Hugh began to read. The two sisters in the poem were Laura and Lizzie.

Lizzie,
he thought; no wonder she identified with it.

The sisters hide among the brookside rushes in the woods and hear the ugly goblin men hawking their luscious, tempting fare—
“come buy
our orchard fruits, come buy, come buy . . .”
Lizzie, the virtuous one, plugs 
her ears and flees, but Laura is irresistibly drawn to them and succumbs, paying with a lock of her golden hair.

Then:

She sucked and sucked and sucked the more

Fruits which that unknown orchard bore,

She sucked until her lips were sore . . .

Laura returns home, addicted to the fruit, thrashing about in a passionate frenzy when it is denied her. The yearning becomes so strong that she falls ill and is finally at death’s door. Lizzie can stand it no longer; she must save her sister. She puts a silver penny in her purse and goes to the goblin men. They want her to feast with them. When she refuses and demands her penny back, they attack her and try to force her to eat their fruit. But she keeps her mouth closed and
“laughed in
heart to feel the drip of juice that syruped all her face and lodged in dimples
of her chin.”

She runs home and shouts for Laura:

Did you miss me?

Come and kiss me.

Never mind my bruises,

Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices

Squeezed from goblin fruits for you.

Laura does.
She clung about her sister, kissed and kissed and kissed her.

She falls into a swoon that lasts through the night and awakens rejuvenated. Years later, when both are wives and mothers, they gather their children around to tell them of the goblin men and how one sister saved the other.

For there is no friend like a sister,

In calm or stormy weather,

To cheer one on the tedious way,

To fetch one if one goes astray.

Hugh put the book down thinking of Lizzie, Darwin’s Lizzie. Of course the poem would hold an almost hypnotic appeal for her. She

would be drawn to it the way Laura in the poem was drawn to the fruits of the goblin men.
Come buy my fruits, come buy, come buy.

A shaft of sunlight fell on the book. Hugh raised it and turned it in the golden stream and as the pages twirled, a piece of paper floated down and dove to the floor. He bent down and picked it up. A letter. It was written on thick stationery with a heavy watermark—actually, half of a letter on half a sheet of paper. The top, with the salutation, was missing, as if it had been torn.

He assumed it was written to Lizzie because it had been secreted in her book and he thought he recognized the thick-stemmed, squat letters of her mother Emma’s penmanship. The script was jagged, as if it had been composed in a frenzy.

Even if I did not tell your Papa, your transgression would soon become all
too obvious to him. It will break his heart. I do not know what advice to give
you except to say that you should pray for his forgiveness and for the Lord’s
forgiveness. Be prepared for the worst and submit yourself with a repentant
heart to whatever punishment you receive for you well deserve it. You will
have to be sent away. Daughter, how could you have done this? How could
you have been so thoughtless and cruel? Do not you care at all for our family?

Do not you think of how your actions will reflect upon us all? Contemplate
for one moment the shame you have brought upon our poor household. This is
what comes of turning away from God and from our Saviour Jesus Christ. I
knew from the moment you refused confirmation that you had set foot on the
wrong path, but I never thought it would lead to this. Oh, what shall we do?

How shall we go on from here?

I am in full despair.

Your mother who loves you still,

Emma

Hugh put the letter in his pocket, crossed the vast reading room, and entered a sideroom with a Xerox machine. He copied the letter, then placed it back in the book and brought the book to the return counter.